A RYEDALE woman who used to watch Second World War dogfights over her home as a teenager has celebrated her 93rd birthday with a flight in a Spitfire.

Barbara Kemp, who turned 93 on Sunday, said the surprise present had been “the experience of a lifetime”.

Mrs Kemp was born in Bexhill on the south coast. As a 14-year-old, working in service to a family, looking after their children, she watched Spitfires fight German planes coming over the channel.

She said: “That’s what started me off liking planes, because we used to watch the dogfights. We lived on the coast between Bexhill and Hastings.

“They used to come over from the other side of the channel. No siren went, because they were so quick. I used to watch them sometimes coming home from work. I used to think the Spitfires were absolutely amazing, the way they dived up and down. That was my first impression of aeroplanes.”

She also described a close encounter with a German fighter.

She said: “Where we lived, I heard this noise and went outside on the veranda and this plane came by, dropped a bomb three doors away, and I could see the pilot clearly in the cockpit, you know. And I always thought afterwards, well I suppose he could have used his machine gun and shot me down! That was something to see.”

During the war she was evacuated to St Neots in Cambridgeshire and worked at Papworth, machining airmen’s suits. She watched Lancaster and Halifax bombers leave the base in the evening and counted them back in the morning.

Her first ever flight was at the end of the war, when her cousin had a lucky ticket for a free flight, and gave it to Barbara. “That was my first flight on a plane, and I thought it was out of this world.”

Her husband, Dennis Kemp was in the RAF and then the Fleet Air Arm. She moved up to Thornton-le-Dale 36 years ago, in 1981, then moved over to Allerston last year.

The family were in the garden last year and a plane was flying around overhead. Barbara casually remarked to her son Raymond that going up in a Spitfire was something she had always wanted to do.

“I didn’t know you could do it, but he evidently looked into it, managed to book a flight, and then didn’t tell me - just said we were going to do something special. I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years.”

She was in the Spitfire for a 40-minute flight which went from Biggin Hill to Beachy Head on the south coast, near where she grew up.

“It was lovely. I wasn’t nervous at all, but then I don’t suffer with nervousness. The pilot was so very nice. The sky was clear, it was a lovely day. I was very fortunate. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

“When you get in the cockpit, they explain all the things you’re supposed to do if anything happens. You have a parachute. By the time he’d finished my head was spinning. I said to him, ‘I think it would be easier if I just forget that and go down with the plane!’

“It was the experience of a lifetime, especially at my time of life.”

The Spitfire she flew in was MJ627 which, though since slightly modified, was used in combat in the second world war, and is recorded as having destroyed a Messerschmitt over Arnhem.